Debian Weekly News - November 23rd, 2004

Welcome to this year's 46th issue of DWN, the weekly newsletter for the
Debian community. In an interview
Richard Stallman explained why it is important in terms of freedom and
cooperation to have schools use Free Software.
VA Linux Systems Japan recently announced the release of VA Balance, a load
balancing system, based on UltraMonkey and Debian GNU/Linux.

Bug Squashing Parties. Several bug squashing parties (BSP)
will take place during the last weekend of this month, on November 27th and
28th. Alexander Schmehl announced the BSP in Frankfurt/Main
(Germany). Anand Kumria announced
the BSP in Sydney (Australia). David Moreno Garza announced the virtual BSP in Latin America.
Finally Steve McIntyre announced the BSP in Cambridge (UK).
The overall planning is done through the
Debian wiki.
As usual, #debian-bugs on irc.debian.org will be the virtual counterpart to the
real-life parties.

Mass Filing of Documentation Bugs? Brian M. Carlson proposed
to file serious bugs against packages that contain documentation licensed
under the GNU FDL since it
is not free according to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. Colin Watson, however, recommended
not to file bugs on documentation until after sarge since the project agreed
by vote that it was not to be
considered release-critical for the sarge release.

Debian and LCC? Laszlo Boszormenyi wondered
if the Debian project would join to the Linux Core
Consortium (LCC, FAQ) or
implement it. Implementation would refer to LSB 2.0 compatibility.
Ian Murdock tried to explain that it may require to provide a different set of core packages
than Debian provides, even for a Debian-based distribution.

Speeding up the Boot Process. Jochen Voss was inspired by Ziga Mahkovec and inspected
boot process of some Debian systems. The result is not as beautiful as
Ziga's, though. Adrian von Bidder added
that he has moved everything needed by interactive users early in the boot
process, while moving things like postfix, Apache, PostgreSQL etc. to the end.
With this, he could already log in while the system was still booting.

Alioth Update in Progress. Wichert Akkerman reported that he has been working on a new machine that is planned to
replace haydn in the future as Alioth host. The new machine and software are
now approaching a more or less stable state where user experience is sought.
Wichert has copied an all Subversion repositories from Alioth so the new WebSVN gateway can be tested.

First Debian Women IRC Meeting. Erinn Clark has invited
interested people to participate in the first meeting of the Debian women sub-project. Helen Faulkner took minutes of the meeting which was attended by people who are
involved with and use Debian in a variety of ways. Attendants discussed
the success of the Debian women sub-project so far, and plans for future
activities that will further the goal of increasing the participation of women
in Debian.

Debian Installer Release Candidate 2. Joey Hess announced the second Debian-Installer release candidate
which is also expected to be the final release of the installer for the
upcoming Debian 3.1 (sarge). Only a few changes have been made to the
installer since the pre-rc2 release last month. Support for LVM volumes on
software RAID has been added among many improvements, though.

Security Updates. You know the drill. Please make sure
that you update your systems if you have any of these packages installed.

Orphaned Packages. 16 packages were orphaned this week and
require a new maintainer. This makes a total of 231 orphaned packages. Many
thanks to the previous maintainers who contributed to the Free Software
community. Please see the WNPP pages for
the full list, and please add a note to the bug report and retitle it to ITA:
if you plan to take over a package.

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